The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  The fat man slapped his jellylike arms against blossoming thighs and his whole body rippled side to side in an exaggerated negative motion. Remson could hear him wheezing from the effort that the long speech—or standing upright so long—had cost him.

  The admiral said, "Questions, anyone? Counters to the labs' positions?

  A ConSpaceCom colonel said, "Seems to us that the real security problem here isn't a power problem. We're convinced from in-house discussions that we could tow the habitat intact, although the Secretariat might be happier with a new Stalk that incorporated new technology. The real problem lies in the fact that there's no advantage in this whole undertaking to anybody but the Unity aliens, who are asserting that their ships and members need basing facilities where spacetime is less warped by so many intersecting gravity wells. So we see a two-fold problem."

  The seated colonel held up two fingers. "One, we've got an intel problem: our intelligence component isn't happy with doing anything radical unless there's a clear benefit to our side. We don't know nearly enough about these aliens to be inviting them into our solar system, despite the Secretariat's position to the contrary." The ConSpaceCom officer, who was in plainclothes and who hadn't bothered to hand out his card, ticked off his first point.

  Then came his second objection: "And, two: security components want to have a clear understanding of what the downside might be if we make ourselves more accessible to these aliens. Do we want to make commerce easier for them? And does that mean we're making commerce harder for ourselves? Where's the upside? Does the Secretariat have information it's withholding? Can humans be comfortable for long periods of time where the gravity stresses we evolved in aren't present? Why should we go forward with any abrupt change in policy when we've had so little contact with these Unity aliens and know so little about them? What was wrong with them building an embassy out at the Ball site, the way we gave them permission to do? We—"

  'That's enough," Remson interrupted sharply, usurping the briefer's prerogative before things got any worse. "What's your name, Colonel?"

  "Martin, Mr. Secretary," said the ConSpaceCom colonel, looking at his hands with too-bright eyes.

  "Don't sandbag these proceedings, Mister. Don't even think about it." Some damage was already done, but Remson was angry and determined to handle the grenade that ConSpaceCom had just thrown in his lap. At least he understood the problem now: he was facing concerted bureaucratic resistance, not contractor games from NAMECorp. "If you think you can stop this project by questioning policy in the name of security, think again. This session is classified, but we have the ability to take the whole matter public. It's to the benefit of humanity to establish relations with the Unity worlds: that's not yours to determine. It's a given in these meetings. Or should be. And if the military tries to obstruct the Secretariat, I assure you, everybody on Threshold, from Blue North to the Loader Zone, will be informed through public media and declaratory language of the great opportunity awaiting the human race. If we need to, the Secretariat will convene a Security Council meeting. Got that, mister?"

  The colonel didn't look up. His neck flushed red. The room was completely quiet. Into that silence, Remson threw his final challenge.

  "Give me a finished report by the end of the week, with cogent operational recommendations. If you throw this up to the policy level and start an internal debate, you'll lose the ability to input even the operational planning. Policy responsibility for these matters, and the relevant decision making, are a Secretariat prerogative. This whole program is running out of the Secretariat Alien Affairs office. Period. Now stop squabbling and get me a logistical report I can use. Fast."

  He turned on his heel and charged the door, which got out of his way with a hiss. He was going to make sure Martin realized that his career had taken a wrong turn and early retirement was his only option. It wouldn't solve the whole problem, but it would serve as an object lesson to the rest of them.

  Remson had more to do than babysit these symposia. He had a model of an alien consular official—or the closest equivalent—in the Secretariat. His boss was asking questions of it as if it were a real person, not an artifact. The mystery surrounding the creation of that artifact should have told Mickey that the Forat-Cummings girl shouldn't be turned loose on Threshold.

  Because maybe she wasn't the Forat-Cummings girl at all but some alien construct.

  Intelligence problems. The only real intelligence problems in the room that Remson had just left was the sum of the IQs of the people inside. The real intelligence problems surrounding this first contact with aliens capable of presenting a threat to humanity were manifold.

  And if those problems turned out to foreshadow realtime threats, there wasn't a weapon in the UNE arsenal capable of giving the Unity aliens a run for their money.

  So when the Unity aliens wanted you to move your governmental center a few billion miles, you said, "No problem." Because the alternative might be worse. Lots worse.

  CHAPTER 7

  Stories From Beyond

  "Ricky, you've got a great opportunity here," said Richard the Second to hi* son and heir. He put an arm around the shoulders of Richard Cummings III as they walked the parapet of the Cummings Blue North mansion. Ahead was a stairwell down which his son's new-wife—she should rot in hell—waited with that dim, glassy-eyed stare. Above was a dome through which a man could see the stars.

  "I know. Father." The boy exhaled in a long-suffering sigh. "But that's the trouble." Rick's tone was patronizing, "I'm not sure you understand the opportunity at all."

  Richard stopped and look his arm from his son's shoulders. The boy turned to face him it was all Cummings, Senior could do not to backhand his son across the face.

  "Patronizing, arrogant, holier-than-thou ... what did I do to deserve this from you. Rick? Just tell me? You smuggle contraband life-forms, drugs, and what have you. You get involved with a fundamentalist Muslim sect that likes to top off the heads of their law-breakers in the Medinan town square. You elope and nearly gel yourself killed in the process You get rescued or captured and brainwashed by aliens nobody's ever encountered before, and you expect me to listen to a lecture on my opportunities? From you?

  From your Medinan whore? Or from your cone-headed alien buddies?"

  "Dad—" The pain in the boy's voice would haunt Cummings forever. The look of shock and horror and hurt on Rick's face flared nakedly, to be replaced too soon with guarded, petulant wariness. "You don't understand. None of you do. We should never have come back. When we get home—"

  Richard Cummings balled his fists at his sides to avoid striking his son. "Home? Somewhere in an alien stronghold? This is your home, son. What do you think I've spent my life building an empire for? You have responsibilities here, or have you forgotten? All of this—"

  "Don't say it. Don't say, 'all of this can be yours someday,' because I don't want it."

  Richard Cummings' temper flared. "Fine. Then you won't have it." He pulled out the memo pad from his breast pocket, actuated it, watching Rick's face, and said into its microphone grille: "This day and date. I, Richard Cummings, Junior, being of sound mind and body, et cetera, hereby fully and completely disinherit and remove Richard Cummings the Third from my will. Legal, execute, and annotate this order immediately, making sure that Junior benefits in no way from my estate, my death, or any NAMECorp holding or corporate entity now or in future. Effective immediately."

  Cummings glared silently at his son for three heartbeats before he put the memo pad away. Then he gawked disbelievingly at the unresisting, unprotesting creature that had once been his son and heir, as if Rick had turned into a cone-headed alien with weird physiology, the way he kept expecting the Forat girl to do at any moment. "They have brainwashed you, haven't they?"

  No son of his would have stood there and allowed the training and compromises, the endless preparation and arduous schooling of a lifetime, to be thrown away in one moment of family dispute.

  But it had happen
ed. It happened because the boy before him was no longer the son he'd raised.

  Rick opened his mouth to speak, wet his dry lips with his tongue, and Richard's heart leapt. A hug, a kiss, a tearful apology, and all would be right between them once again. He'd void his order as quickly as he'd given it. .. .

  Rick said defiantly, "You can bet your empire that the aliens have brainwashed me, in your terms. They've given me a chance to clean out my mind, to throw away all the filth you and your friends have filled me with. You bet I'm brainwashed. The Unity aliens washed me clean of all your greed and stupidity. They've shown me that there's more to life than cutting deals and making money, if that's what you mean by brainwashing. How much money do you need, Dad? How much power have you got, when you don't have a moment to call your own? When do you say enough? When you are going to have time for a life? You never had time for my life. Time is what's important. Time is the only irreproducible commodity. Time is all any of us have...."

  "Sophomoric bullshit," said Cummings, his heart sinking down through his chest toward his feet. Before he showed weakness in front of his son, he turned away. Before he wept openly, he strode past Rick and toward the stairwell. Without turning around, he said, "I've never sanctioned this marriage of yours, you know. Neither has the Mullah Forat. Her father's on his way to Threshold. I'm sending word to him that, when he arrives, he and I are going to have a long and serious talk about you and your Muslim lady. Just remember, Mr. Cummings, oil and water don't mix."

  Then he couldn't say any more, or his voice would betray him. The stairs were ahead. He had to blink the tears from his eyes or he'd fall over himself, trying to walk down them.

  A stairwell to Hell could have been no harder to face for a father who had just lost his only son and heir to an alien power he did not understand.

  CHAPTER 8

  Out On The Town

  "Come on, Dini, hurry," her husband called urgently. From the dark innards of a nondescript car that had pulled up to the Cummings mansion's front steps, his hand waved her on.

  She knew this was wrong, but Rick had been insistent.

  Remson would be very angry at her—at them both—and Secretary Croft would be disappointed. They were on their honor to behave.

  She knew that slinking off in a ground car pilfered from somewhere by Rick, to find some person in the Loader Zone, where only criminals and subhumans lived and worked, was not behaving, in the eyes of consular officials.

  But Rick had had some terrible argument with his father, and her husband was inconsolable, full of anger and as wild as he'd been when they'd stolen a NAMECorp spaceship and run off to the stars together.

  As soon as she was inside, Rick thumbed the door controller, the door shut, and he pulled the car away. Dim looked back longingly at the Cummings mansion Such a place Not even the Secretariat had its elegance, its exquisite appointments, its baronial splendor. The Cummings residence squatted atop Threshold as an eagle topped a standard. It should have been the capital of the UNE, to her way of thinking the seat of power.

  Inside had been every modern convenience that had been lacking on Medina; electrostatic Owners and pure water bidets, foods from around the universe, human and automated servants of every sort And antiques from Earth.

  She had seen Earthish delights beyond price. She had walked an "atrium" and strolled a rose garden! A garden! Imagine, a personal garden of marvelous maturity and broad expanse.

  Rick had picked a red rose for her and put it in her hair. She had never touched a rose, let alone smelled the real fragrance of one. It was heady to disregard such great wealth.

  But Rick was adamant. Grim. Even proud, when he'd told her there was no place for them in the Cummings household anymore.

  And she'd felt guilty, thinking of her pets at home and the green hills under lavender skies that were her true home now.

  Rick wanted to leave Threshold. "While we still can," he'd said.

  He was afraid of their parents, she knew. He drove hunched down, manually in control of the car although a red light complained from its control panel that he should cede control to the traffic center and sit back in his seat.

  He did not. She tried three times to engage him in conversation, but he wouldn't talk; he was negotiating traffic she didn't understand, guiding the car into and out of tunnels striped with white guide lights and warning arrows that indicated turn-offs to adjoining tubes, lifts, and levels.

  Once she thought she saw a sign that said loader zone, and cried out: "Rick! There! You've missed it!"

  "Shut up!" he snapped at her, without looking away from the traffic that was all weaving lights ahead and beside them. "You don't know what you're talking about. We're nowhere near there. You'll get us into an accident."

  So she sat back, hurt, and rode in silence, surprised at the vehemence of his reaction.

  She was sure she had seen such a sign, but the truth of the matter, obviously, was beside the point.

  Rick drove and drove and, finally, took a turn from the main tunnel into a side artery. By then, she had realized that only a Stalk dweller could have made sense of the spiderweb of passages that interlinked Threshold.

  She wanted to say she was sorry, but one look at her husband's face told her she should not say anything. He was still radiating anger. He was full of frustration.

  The car pulled to an abrupt stop, throwing her forward against her seat restraint.

  Still he would not look at her. "Get out," he said.

  The door on her side opened, taking her chest restraint with it. Outside she saw a public tubeway. Behind and before theirs, other private cars were stopped. On her side, traffic whizzed by. She nearly stepped into it and caused a whole raft of vehicles to veer to the right in deft synchronization.

  "Get out of the damned traffic!" Rick shouted.

  She ran around the car. "What about the car?"

  "Screw the car. Let my father pay the violation!" Rick shoved her toward the public tubeway.

  Here were more folk, more decisions, and finally a bank of lifts and a public tubeway.

  Rick slapped a lift button and she stood meekly behind him. She knew now that she had been right: he'd been lost. She must pretend now that there had been no error. He was very like his father, was her husband. She hadn't known how much, until she'd been in the Cummings household these last few days. They could not abide errors in others and refused to be accountable for them in themselves.

  When the lift opened, out came a camel-lipped, furry-cheeked Epsilonian woman with beads in the braided mane of her hump, her tail coiled around her arm. Beside her, a humanoid with desert waterpouches in his cheeks and semitransparent dual eyelids made way for her.

  "This way to the Loader Zone," Rick said flippantly and with a superiority she did not understand. Rick brushed by the pair without waiting for them to exit.

  This awkwardness reminded Dini that Rick had the prejudices of the privileged, and that subhumans and bioengineered humans were not treated as equally here as in the Secretariat.

  When they disembarked from the lift, the Loader Zone was bustling with beings of questionable purpose and provenance. Bar signs blinked, and the exposed strutwork above sputtered and seemed to shiver as lights struggled for their share of inadequate power. She remembered this place, yes she did, from her first visit to Threshold.

  But Rick did not want to have a good time here, tonight. He hustled her toward some secret destination unremittingly. They passed food stands offering exotic smells and restaurants spilling the music of mysterious worlds out onto streets, which were marked with color-coded bars along their centers, so dim and faint with age that Dini could make nothing of the information they contained.

  Buildings loomed here. There was no image of a sky above, only the skeleton of Threshold. Sometimes she thought she saw people—or other beings—climbing among the strutwork above her head. Sometimes she thought she heard the music of her homeworld. Sometimes she saw small creatures scurrying in the dimness fr
om one refuse pile to another. Always Rick propelled her forward. Her feet began to hurt. Her head was already swimming from the sensory assault of so many beings gathered in one place. Unhappy beings. Frightened beings. Oppressed beings.

  There was no oppression at home in the Unity. Everything had its place and time and was friendly to biologically anchored beings. Not here. Time was the enemy. It was unflagging. It chased these folk, dogging their tired and hungry steps.

  She longed to leave here. Rick had promised they could leave soon. Now he would hardly talk to her. It was her fault that he had been disinherited. Perhaps he was not as anxious as he claimed to leave Threshold, and all his family wealth, for her love and the Unity.

  Perhaps he was having second thoughts. Perhaps ... he didn't love her as much as he thought.

  He wasn't acting as though he loved her. His grip on her hand was hard, sweaty, and far too tight. By it, he dragged her forward.

  Panting, she caught up and said, "Rick, I love you." She said it very softly, in case the saying of the words would further anger him.

  He said, without slowing, "I love you too, Dini," but it sounded like a rote formula, a prayer said too many times, a greeting without feeling.

  She missed her pets. She missed her home on a green hill under lavender skies. For the first time since she had fled Medinan justice with her lover, she even missed her father. Just a little. Not as he was now, but as he had been, long ago, when life had been simple and she was a child of the desert on Medina.

  Rick stopped and she nearly rushed by him. He jerked on her hand to bring her up short. "Here."

  She looked where he meant, up crumbling steps, to a door recessed in darkness.

  He went up to it and pounded. He pushed a plate, punched a button.